A HOMEFUL OF ROOMS
by Carlo Cattaneo Adorno
“It’s not a gun,” our mother told us. She unwrapped the white cloth and held up a deer leg. “It’s definitely not a gun.”
Once she had set the leg down on the table my older brother, blinded by the thought of owning a firearm, swiped it. In a minute he was stalking our sixty-year-old grandmother around the house for sport, the heavy thing pinched under his arm. He picked his way stealthily around the dark living room, using the deer’s bristles as cross hairs and its knee cap as a trigger. Our grandmother loped away as fast as she could. She hurdled over obstacles, old pieces of furniture. She leaped over our cat. She was a frighteningly vigorous woman.
She fell to the ground when he shot her, and pretended to die, wide-eyed. To finish her off he brought the hoof down on her chest and stamped lunar bruises onto her skin.
Later, as I helped her from the floor, she laughed in my face and assured me she wasn’t hurt. But her laugh revealed a subtle tremble in her voice. Secretly, I was glad he went after her and not me; my brother can pack a stomach-churning punch. “Look,” my grandmother said proudly, and pulled the neckline of her cardigan to just above her breasts, exposing inflamed, dark medals on her skin.
On Tuesday, on our doorstep, we found an enormous orange cooler packed with dry ice. Inside it, buried in the ice, laid the boneless hindquarters of a deer. This time we mistook it for nothing else, and at night we dined on fine cuts of glazed venison. As we sat down to eat we heard the sounds of my brother arriving from work: the jingle of keys in the lock, his footfall on the carpet.
“I had forgotten this,” he said of the smell, turning the corner into the dining room, his nostrils flaring, his chest expanding. He stood at a distance, inhaling, as though extracting nutrients from the air. We hadn’t eaten meat for over a month. We couldn’t afford it.
“Plates,” our father requested from each of us. As he reached to carve the haunch with one arm, the sides of his wheelchair rasped against the table and his cuff smeared with gravy. I hadn’t seen him quite this confident since he had left the hospital—dispensing dinner, relieving our hunger, as if we were the ones that needed to be cared for—but in reality his hand-eye coordination wasn’t great. He made a mess trying to serve me rice. A slice of meat catapulted off his fork and landed on our grandmother’s lap.
“Out,” my brother said as he strode across the room in a murderous temper towards our father. He fumbled for the meat on our grandmother’s lap and dumped it back on her plate. He grabbed hold of our father’s wheelchair and rolled him away. “You’re wasting food,” he hissed, his mouth watering with the sibilance. The promise of the meal made him impatient. He left our father sulking silently, alone at the other end of the table.
The rest of us said nothing and ate with our heads bowed. The only things I could hear were strange chewing and gulping sounds. The only things I could see were throats moving up and down, and out of the corner of my eye our father trying to spoon food neatly into his mouth.
As my mother had told the doctors, it happened like this: They had both gone out for groceries. She picked up some milk and flour, he bought canned vegetables. They came back on the bus, each carrying a plastic bag. The bus wove in and out of traffic, stopped and started, loaded and unloaded. At first he lost control of his left arm then, excruciatingly, he lost control of his left leg. His arms were shaking, but his grip tightened; the cans rattled in the plastic bag. My mother dropped the flour and the milk, which skated across the floor of the bus irresponsibly. Later, when the bus stopped, he was medevacked to the hospital.
He remained at the hospital for two weeks, because Medicaid covers only fourteen days of intensive therapy. Then he was transferred to a care facility for severe stroke victims, where they stopped the therapy and put him on high medication instead. He is permanently disabled on his left side.
My mother found out he was losing his memory, but the care facility still refused further therapy. Consequently, she got him into a private hospital and racked up an enormous, outstanding medical bill.
“He may have difficulty remembering people he just met or new things,” the new doctor warned us. He said this in front of my father who looked up at us. “He may have trouble finding words. Or he may say things that don’t make sense.” The doctor looked down, and by the way he said this we expected my father to either burst into laughter, or say something laughable. “He is having some trouble swallowing,” he added.
“I wish at least he had a body that worked,” I said, lugging the wheelchair through the automatic doors, into the light outside.
“There are worse things,” my mother told me. I knew better than to argue.
A week before we moved to our new apartment we began selling our furniture. I changed into a suit and tie and welcomed people into our house, people I had never met before. My grandmother had spent the afternoon making price tags. She walked around the house—our house, the place in which we had grown up—estimating the value of our memories. She wrote down figures on small cards, and leaned them against the chair, the clock, everything else. She made our house look incredibly trivial. Crestfallen, my father and mother sat on the couch and watched men as they asked their wives, “Is it worth thirty-two dollars?”
All of them were couples, looking to buy. They touched frayed edges delicately, they examined surfaces for scratches, they turned objects over in the four hands they shared between them. My grandmother overzealously reassured them and described the merits of this or that. I was brought in to testify: What a great lamp. What a great, great lamp.
Every time money exchanged hands my mother would drop her head to my father’s ear and say, “There goes your piano,” or “Say goodbye to the coffee maker.” She looked haggard and tearful. Even though she had always thought herself a free spirit, unattached to material possessions, I could tell she was grieving. Owning a lot of furniture had allowed her those opinions, inoculating her against the reality of being poor.
By the end of the afternoon our house was denuded. We’d sold nearly everything we owned. It had felt more like a purge than a sale. Only the couch remained, the beds, and basic kitchen utensils. A woman even bought the jacket right off my back, for her own son.
My brother worked at the Memory Foam Mattress factory seven days a week, from morning until night. At 7 a.m. the materials arrived in trucks at one end, flowed through the factory as they were assembled, and were loaded out the back door. Blocks of polyurethane were sliced by machines; fabric ran through the panel-quilter. Everything was cut to size precisely before my brother could hog ring the padded layers together, so that the foam didn’t ride around inside the mattress. He stayed late and worked overtime whenever there was higher demand. In our family he was the main breadwinner. My grandmother and my mother worked at home as seamstresses, but they made very little money.
Every evening my brother came home exhausted and defeated. It was as though the assembly line was a circuit, draining him of electricity. He looked like he was about to collapse. “I just keep going,” he confessed when we took a shower together in the morning. “My mind is in a loop, numbed. I think this is what being a workhorse must feel like, or a racehorse.” He spoke, with his back to me and his face in the water, into the showerhead like he was confessing to somebody above us. The water ran in squiggles down the length of his back, down his legs. “You think, I got through today, maybe I can get through tomorrow. But someday, you know they’ll put you down and turn you into glue.”
His body had changed. I barely recognized him. He was possessed. He was a lycanthrope. Someone was sitting inside him, spinning follicles and pushing them out through the pores of his skin. Every day he looked more and more like our father, or at least what our father used to look like. He reminded us all of the past, before the stroke, something not quite forgotten. An imprint of a body on a mattress.
Then he turned around and said, water sputtering over his lips, “I’m warning you, before you know it, this will be you.” His eyes were closed.
Our new apartment was neither new nor an apartment. All five of us slept in one bedroom. A double bed for our mother and grandmother, a double bed for me and my brother, and a folding cot for our father. Kitchen and bathroom had been condensed into one unit, divided by a sheet of plywood. The place was located all the way at the edge of town, separated from an industrial park—my brother could walk to work—by the freeway. The building was black on the outside.
We had to let our cat go. We stopped feeding her; she got thinner and began hunting outside for prey. We watched her chasing mice on the streets one day, then never saw her again.
At first, our new life wasn’t terrible. I had always hated our cat, she’d seemed like an enigma to me, and I was glad to see her go. For a while, even living in such close quarters to my family was comforting. Together it seemed like we could relieve ourselves of our anxieties. When we lay in bed at night we forgot about our expenses, we forgot that supporting a family with one full-time, minimum-wage job was unsustainable, and we let the math of day evaporate over our heads. I could watch my mother, always the logical, forward-thinking woman, as she fell into sleep, and was handed over like a bride to her own subconscious.
But after a month or so things began to turn. We were still waiting for my father’s disability benefits to arrive. Our situation became pernicious, and as it did, we began to resent him for having landed us in it. It was during one of these days that I woke up in the middle of the night to a terrible moaning. It came from the kitchen/bathroom, a primal, gut-wrenching sound. I was convinced an animal was producing it; maybe our cat had returned and was clawing at the door. I got up, careful not to wake my brother, and made my way to the door.
Everything was dark. I could just make out the outline of pots and pans hanging over the stove. There was a window above the sink, and the chromed faucet glinted under a moonbeam. A car turned into a freeway ramp beside our apartment building, its headlights scything across the window. The interior of the room lit up and shifted. In the flash I saw my father, his head in his hands. He was sobbing uncontrollably. The ground was littered with cutlery and torn paper. The wheelchair shook with his sobs.
Darkness for a minute.
Then another car. My father’s white hair pulsed in the light. Shadows ran around the room. I felt like we were living, microscopically, inside a photocopier. Somebody outside, I was sure, was trying to duplicate his grief.
I came into the room and squatted down beside him. He smelled bad. Very probably, he had messed his pants. My mother usually let him sit on it for an hour or two before she cleaned it up. He looked at me, shamefacedly, with drowning eyes.
“I want all of this to be over,” he said, with so much fluency that I wondered if he hadn’t been practicing this sentence again and again in his head. “I want for us to return to our old house.” He was looking to me for solutions, as if I had the ability to determine his fate. How to go about reassuring him? I’d soon be working at the mattress factory, or I’d hold a job sacking potatoes or something. I’d go the way my brother had gone; my life would become a routine. I knew for sure that then, along with his benefits, we’d be able to buy our house back.
I never stayed long enough to get the job. A year later I left home in midwinter suddenly. I was scared, and fear doesn’t come steadily like the drips from an IV. It came all of a sudden, all at once, in the kitchen as I had stood there looking at him. All I could think of was, What could be worse than this?
Way up north I fell in with a couple of Cherokees who had built a shack by the side of the road. Together they ran it as a motel. One of them was a big man who pulled my scooter in through the snow, into the motel. I had been all but paralyzed by the cold. The other was his brother-in-law, who wove blankets and cooked in a pit. He gave me a warm coat and fed me.
The sight of them cancelled the loneliness I had been feeling on the road. They were also glad to see me, I guessed, because I stayed on for a few months and was never asked for a cent. They were my better angels, loftier, more dignified versions of my family. They expected nothing from me. The snow kept falling freely for days and made us wince at what might happen to us. Waiting for them, up in the mountains behind us, they told me they had wives and families, but down here, in the valley, we became as close as any.
I had been living in Seattle for a number of years when I got a call from my brother. I didn’t speak to him often, but his voice had changed. It was strained and fragile, as if his mind was having a hard time scaling the immensity of the words formed in his mouth. In the last few years he had developed a close relationship with our father, he told me. My brother never said it, but I knew the man had died.
“Can you believe it, those benefits came in the mail the other day,” he laughed. I laughed, too, but something slid loose and rattled inside me.
by Carlo Cattaneo Adorno
